EDWARD SAPIR CRITIQUE
Although Sapir was regarded as a linguistic genius and although he spent fifteen (15) years in Ottawa, Canada, his focus of study was on the tribes of the North American West Coast.
Comment: Thus, the Algonquin languages of Northeast America were not Sapir's focus of interest. Given his lack of study on the topic, he could not have made definitive judgement on the Algonquin - Old Norse hypothesis.
He wrote four papers (1.4%) about the West Coast Algonquin tribes. He wrote two papers (0.7%) on western plains Algonquins. He wrote one paper (0.35%) evaluating the Nordic race superiority.
To believe he would have indentified the relationship between Algonquin- Old Norse, without intensive study, is an attempt to turn a genius into a god. Because Sapir did not catch the relationship only proves that his focus was on other things.
One man, Sherwin, spent more than sixteen years of his life focused only on the hypothesis that the Algonquin language was Old Norse. Even though he spoke a lanugage similar to Old Norse and became interested in the Algonquin language by what he heard, he studied for eight more years before he could declare with assurance that the relationship was true.
